john took me out for dinner last night for a break away from turkey (it’s all we’re going to be eating this week!), and it looks like they added new options to the menu…. ha!

.

what a lovely friday evening! john and i hosted our first thanksgiving dinner ever, with 10 people and a large turkey, pies, so much food! afterwards we played guitar hero and lazed around and chatted and laughed. especially sweet was that two of our guests had gotten engaged earlier in the evening, and another friend had just finished his GMAT and had a score to celebrate. the 12 bottles of wine, bottle of champagne and 2 bottles of jim beam probably helped the sweetness as well… yum!

.

settling fairly quickly into a winter rhythm, cold weather means bundling up and more time spent in the kitchen and in the bedroom. the fog is upon us this afternoon (peep the view out the w+k windows) and all i wanna do is crawl under the covers. made a new mix, full of warm & fuzzy!

.

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD: FALL/WINTER 2009

.

woke up this morning VERY PLEASED to find that my friend merek has FINALLY recorded a new Sleephouse Radio podcast. merek is one of my buddies from a long time ago in vancouver, although he moved back to london shortly after we met. he now lives in norway on some kind of farm with his lovely lady and apparently deer in the back yard and chopped wood and a grizzly man beard.

you can download (right click/save as) the latest podcast or just go to the site, this edition has the dirty projectors, kurt vile, cold cave and destroyer, amongst others. also, merek has the most soothing, lovely of voices, his dulcet tones (when not shouting at me over vietnamese noodles in london) are a treat!

.

thanksgiving dinner part one at jan’s, there was an enormous turkey and enough food to feed an army (helpful, since there was an army of people in attendance). tonight, john and i are hosting turkey eats and i hope it turns out, need to head home at some point and tidy and prep.

ps. i finally got sick of not having a camera so i picked up a new cheapy cheap point and shoot yesterday. more photos soon!

.

.

friend SANDY has been blogging up a storm lately on her latest food blog, PHAT IN SHANGHAI. she reviews a nice mix of dirty cheap local places and frou frou higher end expat joints – i might be biased but her site has quickly become my favourite shanghai food resource on the web. check it out!
.

so i’ve had google wave for the past month now and i’m still confused as to what exactly i’m supposed to be using it for. anyone else having this problem?

i saw this chart the other day and it made me think about how many platforms/sites i’ve signed up to over the years. it also made me think about how you define SNS today, and how the lines have become totally blurred.

i’ve been emailing with my friend merek about being too linked in, or if it’s even possible to be so. how much is too much? sometimes it feels like i’m twitter/blog/facebook’ing everything in my life (my tumblr is linked to facebook which is linked to twitter and round and round and round it goes) but to what end?

i don’t know if i could really say that my overall quality of life is greater improved because of my overzealous net use, although i can point to a few key instances where having an online web presence have lead to cool opportunities i wouldn’t have otherwise been offered. generally, i don’t feel like i’m overwhelmed, although he does and maybe it’s a generation thing. i’ve been online since i was around 13 or 14, and despite living in china with it’s infamous GFW, my relationship with the internet has continually evolved and grown.

in the last 10+ years of internet use, i’ve signed up for/used/used then scorned/obsessively followed the following:

digg, del.icio.us, technorati, youtube, linkedin, facebook, myspace, friendster, flickr, twitter, livejournal, youtube, xanga (srsly), deviantart, last.fm, nexopia, photobucket, nexopia, pandora, couchsurfing, orkut, makeoutclub (!!!) google wave, ning, buzznet, tumblr, imeem, epicurious, fotolog, HI5, vox, yammer, windows live, opendiary, blogspot, stumbleupon, posterous, metacafe, catster/dogster (!!), showhype, muxtape, hypemachine, dopplr…

keep in mind that this list doesn’t include the myriad of obligatory sign ups i have for dozens of newspapers, instant messenger accounts, etc, or the number of message boards i used to post to as a pre-teen figuring out the internet. so what’s the point?!

POSTSCRIPT: upon further reflection, i don’t want this post to sound overly whiney or indecisive, the internet has been great for certain things, the main result being the introduction to some people who i’ve been friends with for years and years. i didn’t meet my best friend from highschool until junior year, although we quickly established that we had been both obsessively posting to the same message board for years, and people like drew and i had been in contact for years as well before he moved back to shanghai and we got to become REAL LIFE FRIENDS. sean and dan are people i have been in contact with since i was a wee teenager, and over the years our paths have merged countless times through mutual friends (sean emailed me the other day saying he’d run into one of my friends in Tokyo, somehow it came up that we all knew each other, another amazing small world moment that blended real life and the internet!). also, just this weekend, allister and i made the connection that we have both “known” our friend susana for years, despite neither of us having actually met her – so, yes, i’m thankful for the endless connections i’ve made, but it still begs the question if being a computer nerd has been all that worth it.

.

been really slacking on the blog updates lately, and this is partly due to the fact that i’ve also been slacking on taking photos. seems like it’s too cold for people to bring their cameras out lately, because my usually photo-obsessed friends don’t seem to be snapping as much these days either.

the past weekend was pretty huge! on friday, john and i (upon his insistence) went to the OWL CITY show at the Dream Factory. unfortunately, we got there too late to watch ben houge play to a zillion prepubescent, screaming international schoolers (literally, there were 13 year olds in the crowd and the entire venue turned non-smoking for a night, parents were milling around in the back waiting for their kids, etc etc etc augh), but we did catch the entire OWL CITY set, which by the end was enough Owl City to last me the rest of my life.

afterwards, we went for a more grown-up affair and met up with everyone at CHINATOWN for our dear lin lin’s birthday. lots of drinks and fun, and we were finally piled into bed by 3.

on Saturday, there was BADTASTIC – does ANYONE have any photos? please send them to me! (you can see sammy’s HERE.

(if you’re wondering, the photo above is one of the winners of this year’s national geographic photography contest. check out some of the other images here, some of them are fucking mind blowing!)

.

.

business guys on business trips.

.

been sitting on this for a while, but it’s been officially announced that my friend and colleague Nick Barham has been named co-executive creative director of the WIEDEN+KENNEDY SHANGHAI office. Nick previously served our office as planning director, and this is an amazing step forward that showcases W+K’s willingness to redefine and continually push the boundaries of creative thinking and leadership.

without gushing too much, Nick is one of the hardest working people I know, and also one of my favourites. the fact that he is constantly pushing all of us to do better is inspiring, and he has an incredible gift for walking into a room and immediately and accurately accessing what needs to be done and how things can be improved in a way that’s at once crazily creative and strategic in thinking.

super super stoked, and looking forward to many more great projects together and late nights on the town. BIG LOVE!

.